disanthropy

English

WOTD – 25 November 2022

Etymology

PIE word
*dwís

From dis- (prefix meaning ‘against; not’) +‎ -anthropy (suffix meaning ‘humanity’), modelled after misanthropy. The word was coined by the Canadian literary critic Greg Garrard in a 2012 article published in SubStance: see the quotation.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation, General American) IPA^(key): /dɪsˈænθɹəpi/

• Audio (Southern England)

  (file)

• Hyphenation: dis‧an‧thro‧py

Noun

disanthropy (usually uncountable, plural disanthropies)

1. (literary criticism) A misanthropic desire for a world without human life, expressed in literature. [from 2012]
   • 2012, Greg Garrard, “Worlds Without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy”, in Ranjan Ghosh, editor, SubStance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism: Issue 127: Globing the Earth: The New Eco-logics of Nature, volume 41, number 1, Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, →DOI, →ISSN, →JSTOR, →OCLC, pages 40–41 and 44:

     [pages 40–41] D. H. Lawrence, enthused and infuriated by [Friedrich] Nietzsche, entrusted to his alter ego Birkin in Women in Love a desire that I will call "disanthropy": […] Lawrence may have yearned for a world without people, but it was Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse that first explored disanthropy as a formal problem. […] [page 44] Alongside the varied disanthropies of Michael Snow, Werner Herzog, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou, however, other possibilities of formal (usually partial or strictly provisional) impersonality emerge: […]

   • 2018, Astrid Bracke, “Ecocriticism and Jim Crace’s Early Novels”, in Katy Shaw, Kate Aughterson, editors, Jim Crace: Into the Wilderness, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan; Springer Nature, →DOI, →ISBN, page 56:

     Disanthropy is the imagination of the world without humans, inspired by the resurgence of millennial Christianity in the eighteenth century and the discovery of 'deep time' following the publication of [Charles] Lyell's Principles of Geology […].

   • 2020, Pieter Vermeulen, “Glossary”, in Literature and the Anthropocene, Abingdon, Oxfordshire, New York, N.Y.: Routledge, →ISBN, page 174:

     Disanthropy constitutes a formal challenge, as most literary and artistic forms and genres imply a human voice, character, or perspective, which complicates the representation of (often far future) worlds without us.

Hypernyms

• misanthropy

Derived terms

• disanthropic

Translations

misanthropic desire for a world without human life, expressed in literature

• Finnish: disantropia